Everybody who has spent some time in China knows how xenophobic and racist the Chinese are. Normally they are careful not to display their racism too openly in this ‘all face and no shame’ society. Not so in the latest incident in Beijing, where African expats were attacked. See the following article from the Guardian of September 26:

At least 20 black men, including students, tourists and the son of a Caribbean diplomat, were arrested in a popular nightclub district of Beijing on Friday, several of the group being severely beaten on suspicion of dealing drugs, witnesses said.African expatriates in Beijing and witnesses claim the episode revealed a pervasive prejudice toward dark-skinned foreigners in China.

According to five bystanders, teams of police, dressed in black jumpsuits and reportedly wielding batons and taser guns, cordoned off a street in the popular Sanlitun nightclub district at around midnight and rounded up almost all the black men there. Many of the men were beaten.

The raid took place in front of hundreds of stunned expatriates outside the packed bars and clubs of the neighbourhood, which is popular with Beijing’s burgeoning foreign community.”I saw a guy being beaten by these kids. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t fighting back,” said one witness, a white American college graduate working in Beijing.

“I have not really ever seen anything so brutal,” said another American. “There was blood on the streets. They were basically beating up any black person they could find.”

Beijing police yesterday declined to confirm or deny the incident.

The detainees included 22-year-old Joslyn Whiteman, son of Grenada’s ambassador. One witness said he saw police grab Mr Whiteman and beat him repeatedly, despite onlookers crying out, “Stop! He’s a diplomat!” According to the South China Morning Post, Mr Whiteman spent the night in a hospital with concussion. “Obviously I’m very angry,” the ambassador, the elder Mr Whiteman, told the Post. “My son was arrested and beaten for no reason … I will be taking this up with the authorities and looking into the matter.”

Chinese investment in developing countries, and especially Africa, has prompted a reverse migration and a growing number of African and other black people are migrating to China to study, work and learn the language. However, many African immigrants have entered China illegally and work as drug mules, a trade that is highly lucrative but which can bring the death penalty.

African dealers in Beijing offer a wide range of drugs, from cocaine to ecstasy, to a mostly expat market. Sanlitun was once a dealers’ haven but has been substantially cleaned up by roundups. None, though, approached the scale or violence of that on Friday night, described as “excessive” and “chaotic” by witnesses. “I wasn’t surprised [by the use of violence],” one person said. “I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before, but never against foreigners in front of other foreigners.”

This latest raid comes as part of the effort to clean up Beijing ahead of next month’s annual meeting of Communist party leaders and the 2008 Olympic Games, based in the city.

Africans say that living in China in the face of pervasive prejudice can be challenging. When Beijing rolled out the red carpet for more than 40 African heads of state last November, billboards depicting Africans clad in leopard skin underwear, and an indigenous man from Papua New Guinea, plastered the city.

After extended use, cylinder liners of both 4-stroke, and 2-stroke engines will show signs of wear and tear. This wear is not evenly distributed. Most of the wear occurs between the reversal points of the upper and lower piston rings. Often we find scuffing marks where the upper piston ring changes direction. Also most cylinder liners, especially those of 4-stroke engines, will become slightly oval over time.

Another effect of this wear is increased lubricating oil consumption. When a cylinder liner comes out of the factory, it will have a slight cross-hatch pattern honed into it’s surface. This increased roughness helps the liner surface to retain the lubricating oil needed to provide an evenly distributed oil film between the piston ring reversal points. If the surface becomes too smooth due to wear and/or glazing of the surface, the piston rings will easier break the oil film, causing even more wear. Also any excess oil will no longer be retained by the liner surface, and burn off in stead, causing increased lubricating oil consumption.

If the total amount of wear is still within the rejection criteria as given by the manufacturer, the liners can be reconditioned. When we get them in our workshop, we will first clean and measure them. All measurements go into special protocol sheets. The next step is using a honing machine to make the cylinder bore round again, with a slightly bigger diameter, and restore the surface roughness needed to retain sufficient lube oil. Our honing machine can handle cylinder liners up to a diameter of 1 meter. The machine is made by the Swedish company Chris Marine. Here is a brief description of one of their typical honing machines: honing-machine.pdf

The pictures show a liner of a MAN B&W K80MC (this is a marine 2-stroke engine with a cylinder bore of 800mm). The first as we receive it in our workshop, the second with the liner in the honing pit with the honing machine inserted.

Finally the cylinder liner is measured again. Sometimes the landing surfaces between liner and cylinder cover, or liner and engine frame need to be skimmed on the lathe, to ensure the correct flatness of the sealing surfaces. Diameters, surface roughness, and other critical dimensions are recorded, and if everything is within the right tolerances, the liner is packed and shipped back on board again.

If necessary we can also transport our honing machine on board, and perform the honing in-situ, while the liner is still in the engine.

Interesting article by David Blair in the Telegraph of August 31.

No one alive at the close of the 19th century could have missed the “scramble for Africa”. A motley collection of robber barons, imperialist ideologues, explorers, rogues and adventurers - the likes of Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Leopold II, King of the Belgians - carved up the continent in the name of five European powers.

Today, few appear to have noticed that a second “scramble for Africa” is under way. This time, only one giant country is involved, but its ambitions are every bit as momentous as those of Rhodes and company. With every day that passes, China’s economic tentacles extend deeper into Africa. While Europe sought direct political control, China is acquiring a vast and informal economic empire.

Reliable information on Beijing’s African adventure is hard to come by. But we do know that trade between China and the world’s poorest continent totalled about £30 billion last year - a sixfold increase since 2000.

China now buys about one third of its oil from Africa, mainly from Angola, where an £800 million deal to develop a new field was signed last May, and from Sudan, where Beijing built a 900-mile pipeline and invested at least £8 billion. China is spending another £1.2 billion on a new offshore oilfield in Nigeria.

Meanwhile, Beijing has acquired mines in Zambia, textile factories in Lesotho, railways in Uganda, timber in the Central African Republic and retail developments in almost every capital.

The reasoning behind China’s new focus on Africa is simple. If its economic boom is to be sustained, Beijing must find more raw materials and new markets for manufactured goods. Chinese oil consumption is forecast to grow by at least 10 per cent every year for the foreseeable future. At this level of demand, its domestic reserves will vanish within 20 years.

Hence the quest for overseas oil. Yet Beijing’s options are limited. America and the Western powers have already snapped up the world’s largest oil reserves. Saudi Arabia and Iraq - with 45 per cent of the world’s oil between them - are in effect closed to China.

So the less developed tracts of Africa are an obvious target. Sudan’s six billion barrels of proven reserves - with more still to be discovered - have become of vital strategic significance to China.

These facts are of deep concern to many Africans. Their governments may welcome Chinese investment, but Africa’s independent voices do not share this enthusiasm. The consequences of China’s new role there have already been catastrophic.

Thanks to Beijing’s interest in Sudan’s oil, President Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Khartoum has received a windfall. Ten years ago, Sudan’s oil revenues were negligible; last year, Chinese investment ensured that they totalled at least £3 billion.

Without this ready cash, Mr Bashir could never have sustained the war in Darfur, where four years of fighting have claimed about 300,000 lives, either from violence, starvation or disease. The military machine that has laid waste to vast tracts of land, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, was, in effect, bankrolled by Beijing. Moreover, China has sold weapons directly to Sudan, notably Fantan ground attack aircraft.

Elsewhere, China provides a convenient alternative for African leaders spurned by the West for their human rights abuses. Devoid of aid and foreign investment, President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe would be entirely isolated but for China’s backing. Beijing has given Mugabe civilian and military aircraft, and its experts helped design a new mansion for the old dictator, in the style of a Chinese pagoda.

Yesterday, the Chinese government assured Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Africa and Asia, that any future aid for Zimbabwe would be purely humanitarian. Whether China will keep this promise is another matter: Mugabe’s Zanu-PF has received Chinese money for at least 30 years; Zanu-PF’s national headquarters in Harare - found, aptly enough, on Rotten Row - was built by China.

The harsh truth is that Beijing has become the ally of choice for Africa’s worst rulers. While China likes to portray itself as a benign force in Africa, free of the historical baggage carried by the former colonial powers, Beijing’s conduct is already resented.

During last year’s presidential election in Zambia, the leading opposition candidate, Michael Sata, campaigned on an explicitly anti-Chinese ticket. Beijing’s investment was, Mr Sata argued, almost entirely worthless for Zambia.

Yes, China had reopened some copper mines, but the workers were being exploited and all health and safety regulations ignored. An industrial accident at one Chinese-run mine claimed 46 lives in 2005. Later, workers rioted over low wages and poor conditions. Meanwhile, local companies were being driven out of business by cheap imports.

While Mr Sata lost the election overall, he won huge majorities in all the areas of Zambia affected by Chinese investment. His defeat prompted a day of anti-Chinese riots in the capital, Lusaka. Every Chinese-owned shop in the city was barricaded to avoid being looted. Meanwhile, shops owned by whites or Asians carried on trading without incident.

Even inside Mugabe’s crumbling domain, it has not gone unnoticed that all three MA-60 aircraft supplied by China to Air Zimbabwe have a terrifying history of engine fires and emergency landings.

While Americans and Europeans have only just encountered shoddy Chinese consumer goods, ordinary Zimbabweans talk of “zing zong” products - by which they mean exports from China which have a tendency to break in your hands.

Like all empires, China’s economic domain in Africa is stirring deep resentment. The wonder is that it has happened so quickly, and where the scramble will end.

 

An old saying goes: ‘Every journey begins with the first step’. Well, the first step in my Dix 43 project has been made today. I received the so called ‘Study pack’ from Dudley Dix Yacht Design in the mail today. It contains the basic drawings, description, and material list.

With this information I can contact the boat builders which I shortlisted so far, and collect budget quotes for the different stages of construction. I can also start sourcing the main equipment, and get a better idea about the outfitting in general. I am all excited!

As the Dix 43 which I am planning to build will have a steel hull, I have been doing quite a lot of research into this matter. I came upon the web site of Wynand Nortje from South Africa, called ‘Amateur Steel Boat Building’. Wynand is originally a boilermaker by trade, and started building boats in 1981. There is a lot of interesting information on his site about steel hull designs in general, welding techniques, paint and coating systems etc. etc.

He has built a total of 18 boats, amongst which several of the designs of Dudley Dix, like the Dix 38, 57, and 65.